Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The tsar died leaving us this last puzzle—why did he not leave immediately, knowing full well the danger in staying? Why did he walk for such a long time along the deadly canal? Was it weariness of fighting with the camarilla, and his son, and with the madmen who hunted him like a wild animal, which made him lose the will to live? Or was it absolute faith that God would always protect him and that he was invulnerable? Did he decide to prove that to himself and those around him one more time?

  The sound of the first bomb on the canal had traveled far, and it resembled the noon cannon shot at the Fortress of Peter and Paul. But it was past two. An extraordinary agitation enveloped the city after the second blast. Crowds of excited people filled Palace Square and Catherine Canal. Held back by armed guardsmen, the crowd blocked the narrow space of the canal embankment, creating a bottleneck. The sidewalk was a mess of dirtied snow mixed with debris and blood.

  An officer sent by Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich rushed along Nevsky Prospect to Anichkov Palace, to inform the heir. He had been present at the guards parade at the Manege and then had gone back to his palace. The tsarevich and tsarevna had just finished lunch: He was at his desk and she was looking out the window onto Nevsky, when two distant booms reached them. They were trying to guess what it could have been when she saw the sleigh racing down Nevsky, with the officer standing up in it. The tsarevich ran down the stairs, Maria Fedorovna running after him.

  The messenger could only manage: “The tsar is terribly wounded!”

  The gigantic tsarevich in a general’s topcoat and his petite wife next to him rushed to the Winter Palace in a two-seat sleigh. They were slowed by the human bottleneck by the Palace Square.

  In the meantime, at the palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, who had gone to the Manege, his youngest sons planned to go ice skating with thirteen-year-old Nicky, son of the tsarevich. (Nicky was what the future Nicholas II was called in the Romanov family.)

  Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled, “We were supposed to pick him up, when we heard a loud explosion and then a second one. Soon a panting servant ran into the room. ‘The tsar has been killed!’ he shouted. ‘And so is Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich! Their bodies have been taken to the Winter Palace.’

  “Mother ran out of her room upon hearing his screams. We rushed to the carriage at the entrance and hurried to the Winter Palace. We were passed on the road by a battalion of the Life Guards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who were running, rifles over their shoulders, in the same direction.

  “The big spots of black blood on the marble steps and then along the corridor showed us the way to the tsar’s study. Father stood in the doorway, giving orders to the servants…. Mother, shocked to see him unharmed, fainted…. Emperor Alexander II lay on a couch by the desk. He was unconscious…. He looked horrible…. One eye was shut, the other stared ahead without expression…. Members of the Imperial Family came in one after the other. The room was overflowing…. The heir came in and wept, saying, ‘This is what we have come to,’ and embraced the grand dukes, his brother, Vladimir Alexandrovich, and his uncle, Mikhail Nikolayevich.

  “…Princess Yuryevskaya, half-dressed, ran in. They said that some overzealous guard tried to stop her from entering. She fell on top on the tsar’s body, covering his hands with kisses and shouting, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ It was unbearable. The grand duchesses began weeping. Dr. S. P. Botkin examined the dying man…. In answer to the tsarevich’s question of how long the tsar would live, he replied, ‘Up to fifteen minutes.’”

  A boy in a sailor suit was being led up the marble steps. It was the new heir, thirteen-year-old Nicky. He tried to avoid stepping into his grandfather’s blood, but it was hard. The blood of Alexander II was everywhere. Nicky became the heir in blood. And in blood, he would cease being tsar.

  The spiritual advisor of Their Majesties, Father Bazhenov, gave the tsar Communion and Extreme Unction. The death agony began. The doctor, who was taking the tsar’s pulse, nodded and released the bloody wrist. “The emperor has passed away!”

  “Princess Yuryevskaya cried out and fell to the floor. Her pink and white peignoir was soaked in blood,” recalled Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. At around 3.30, the standard of Alexander II was lowered at the Winter Palace.

  The entire Romanov family kneeled around the late emperor. “To my left,” wrote Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, “stood the new emperor. A strange change came over him in that instant. This was not the same tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich, who liked to amuse the small friends of his son, Nicky, by tearing a deck of cards in half or bending an iron rod into a knot. In the course of five minutes he was completely transformed. Something incomparably greater than the simple consciousness of the duties of the monarch illuminated his heavy figure. A fire burned in his tranquil eyes.”

  It was the regal gaze, the heavy, pitiless gaze of Nicholas I. They had all waited for that ruthless gaze, they had all believed that it would return peace and great power to the country. “He made a sign with his hand to Maria Fedorovna, and they left together. Her miniature figure highlighted the mighty build of the new emperor.”

  The grand dukes looked down from the windows of the late emperor’s study with such hope, as they watched the giant tsar Alexander III make his way through the crowds below to his sleigh. He strode and his little wife barely kept up.

  The crowd shouted “Hurrah!” But the new tsar responded angrily to the crowd’s greeting. He was awesome. Surrounded by a hundred Don Cossacks, his sleigh moved. The spears glinted red in the setting March sun.

  The unconscious body of Princess Yuryevskaya was taken from the study to her rooms. After everyone left, they brought in Konstantin Makovsky, Alexander’s favorite painter. He started to work in the fading light. He looked closely at the emperor’s face, covered in tiny wounds. “I worked on his final portrait through my tears,” he wrote.

  The court grieved loudly, while many remembered quietly. They remembered numerous ill omens of the reign. The orb that fell from Gorchakov’s hands during the coronation, and the crown that fell from the empress’s head. About two weeks before his death Alexander kept finding mutilated pigeons on his bedroom window every morning. A falcon had settled on the palace roof. It was so unusually large that they had it stuffed for the museum after it was killed.

  People talked about the mystical coincidence of his last day. After the guards parade at the Mikhailovsky Manege, the tsar had tea with Grand Duchess Ekaterina (Catherine) Mikhailovna; he died on the Catherine Canal; and he was married to another Ekaterina Mikhailovna. His affair with her began in 1866, as did the era of assassinations. “The criminal affair seemed to open an era of attacks on his life. This gives a large field for considerations of a mystical bent, but they creep into your heart whether you want them or not,” said lady-in-waiting Alexander Tolstaya.

  The tsar had married Princess Dolgorukaya at 3:30 in the afternoon, and he took his last breath at 3:33 P.M. To the court it was evident that his death was a reprisal for his sin and preposterous reforms. “And everything was saved by God’s hand, which cut the Gordian knot in time,” Tolstaya concluded.

  Postlude

  The terrorists achieved their immediate goal, but it was a stunning failure. “The people were completely indifferent to the fact of regicide. There was nothing else—no barricades, no revolution. A dreary longing for our failed dream entered my heart,” wrote a revolutionary named Dmitrieva. After the death of Alexander II the secret police suddenly became both wise and powerful. The Great EC was ended quickly. Sofia Perovskaya and almost all the other members were arrested.

  When the prosecutor at the trial began to speak of the tsar’s blood and the innocent victims of the bomb, the courtroom was filled with the peals of Zhelyabov’s laughter. The prosecutor responded with a phrase that all Russia would repeat: “When people weep, the Zhelyabovs laugh.”

  Five were sentenced to hang. During the investigation, one of the condemned men, Nikolai Kibalchich, worked furio
usly on his real work (which he had been too busy with bombs and tsar hunting to do when he was at liberty). “When I came to see Kibalchich,” wrote his defense attorney, “I was struck, first of all, that he was working on something completely unrelated to the trial. He was immersed in research that he was doing on some air-traveling apparatus; he desperately wanted to be given time to write his mathematical research on this invention. He did write it and he presented it to the authorities.”

  The air-traveling apparatus was a fantastic invention: a jet-propelled flying machine. But the head of the police department decided, “Giving this to scientists for examination would hardly be timely and could elicit inappropriate comment.”

  Kibalchich’s project, one of the boldest technological ideas of the centuries, lay unknown, gathering dust in the archives. The scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who later developed the same idea, was stunned when he was shown the terrorist’s concept. On the eve of his hanging, Kibalchich had opened the way to the space age. Terrorism had taken away brilliant minds.

  Before the execution, Kibalchich told his lawyer, “I keep trying to come up with a philosophical formula […] that would persuade me that it is not worth living. No matter how hard I try, I can’t convince myself! I so want to live! Life is so good! Yet I must die! And what of my air ship? Is it safe?”

  Terrorism had taken away brilliant minds.

  On April 3, 1881, Andrei Zhelyabov, Nikolai Kibalchich, Sofia Perovskaya, Timofei Mikhailov, and Nikolai Rysakov were hanged on Semenov Square. The same unfortunate incompetence attended their execution as had plagued the execution of the Decembrists. Huge and heavy Timofei Mikhailov’s noose tore. He fell onto the platform. He was picked up. “Mikhailov was still alive and conscious, so he moved his feet and walked along the platform,” recalled an eyewitness. He was hanged a second time, and once again the noose did not hold and he fell to the ground. The wretch was hanged three times, and on the third attempt, the rope started to wear so the executioner Frolov added a second noose, from the gibbet next to his. Just to make certain, he himself hung from the victim’s legs.

  Five people were hanged, wearing white shrouds and hoods covering their faces, on the square crowded with troops and onlookers.

  It did not get better. Zhelyabov and Rysakov had to suffer for a long time, because their nooses were not placed properly. They were too close to the chin, which prolonged the onset of death.

  Alexander Mikhailov, Alexander Barannikov and Nikolai Kletochnikov condemned to life sentences in solitary confinement, would die in the cells of the Fortress. Prison care was very different under Alexander III. Nechaev died of dropsy in the Fortress in 1882, surviving the emperor very briefly.

  Stepan Khalturin did not spend much time as a free man. He was hanged in 1882 for the murder of the Odessa military prosecutor. He was hanged under an alias, and the police did not know that they were executing the author of the bomb at the Winter Palace.

  The writer and terrorist Stepnyak-Kravchinsky did not avoid a violent death, even in peaceful England. He died under the wheels of a train.

  Of the celebrated terrorists, two survived in solitary confinement—Vera Figner (twenty years) and Nikolai Morozov (twenty-three). Theirs was a different punishment. They lived to see 1917, the “luxuriant tree of freedom” and the “radiant time” of revolution in Russia that Grinevitsky wrote about before going to die killing the tsar. They would also see the entire party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the favorite successors of the People’s Will, die in Stalin’s camps, with famous revolutionaries up against the wall in execution yards. They would see the Russian peasantry perish in Stalin’s collectivization.

  Stalin did not touch them. They were there as living museum exhibits, dying of natural causes in the 1940s. Alexandra Korba died at the age of ninety in 1939, also condemned by fate to observe the joys of civil war and the Stalinist terror.

  The new tsar did not betray the hopes of the Anichkov Palace party. It triumphed at the very first discussion of the reforms signed by his father on March 1. Konstantin Pobedonostsev gave a denunciatory speech. “Your Majesty, the duty both of my position and my conscience obliges me to tell you everything that is in my heart. I am not only perplexed, I am in despair. Just as in previous times they said before the death of Poland, ‘Finis Poloniae,’ now we are almost forced to say, ‘Finis Russiae.’…My heart contracts at the sight of the project presented for your confirmation. I hear falsehood in this project, I’ll say it more strongly: it breathes falsehood…. They want to introduce a constitution in Russia, if not right away, then at least to take a first step in that direction. And what is a constitution? The answer comes to us from Western Europe. The constitutions that exist there are weapons of all kinds of lies, weapons of all kinds of intrigues.”

  Zhukovsky had taught little Alexander II: “Revolution is a fatal effort to leap from Monday right into Wednesday. But the effort to leap from Monday back to Sunday is just as fatal.” Alexander III would leap back into Sunday. To use his words, he “would put an end to the lousy liberals.” Count Loris-Melikov, along with the liberal bureaucrats, was forced to retire. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich lost his position as chairman of the State Council and all his other positions. The great family liberal would be a “private person” until his death.

  That was the end of his father’s great reform using the Loris-Melikov Constitution. “Constitution? They want the emperor of all Russia to swear to cattle?” said Alexander III.

  At a historic crossroads, Russia (once again) took the wrong path. And Pobedonostsev began to rule Russia behind the broad back of the emperor. They would freeze Russia for decades. The nationalist party triumphed, with strict censorship and state anti-Semitism. It was the apotheosis of majestic autocracy.

  When Alexander III, occupied with his favorite pastime, fishing, was asked to sign some papers dealing with urgent European matters, the tsar responded proudly, “Europe can wait while the Russian tsar catches fish.” The aphorism was repeated around the globe.

  Europe could wait, but history would not.

  At the end of his reign, Alexander III felt the results of his successful return to the ways of his ancestors. Not long before his death, the emperor spoke with one of his most trusted people, Adjutant General Oleg Rikhter. “I feel that things in Russia are not going as they should,” the tsar said and asked Rikhter to give his views.

  “I have thought about it for a long time,” Rikhter replied, “and I envision the country as a colossal kettle in which fermentation is taking place, and people with hammers are around it. When the smallest crack appears in its walls, they rivet it. But one day the gases will break though such a large chunk that it will be impossible to rivet it shut, and we will all suffocate.”

  “The tsar moaned, as if in suffering,” Rikhter recalled.

  The boy Nicky who ran up the bloody steps would see that for himself when he was Nicholas II. He and his family and most of the grand dukes who had looked at Alexander III with such hope would die in 1917 and its aftermath. And Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, living as an émigré abroad, would write bitterly, “Of all of us who had gathered at the emperor’s bed, only I am alive.”

  Might there have been a way out? Not long before his death, Dostoevsky wrote, “Solidity will come not to those who shed blood but to those whose blood is shed. There it is, the law of blood on earth.” Both the regime and the terrorists had shed blood generously, so neither side ended up solid.

  The first one to attack the tsar, Karakozov, wrote to Alexander II from his death cell. In prison he had prayed constantly and had come to understand many things. In his letter he asked the tsar to pardon him, “as man to man and Christian to Christian.”

  Karakozov was executed.

  After the unsuccessful attempt on Count Loris-Melikov by Mlodetsky, the writer Garshin begged the count to pardon him and to imagine the effect of that pardon now that the count had announced the dictatorship of conscience.

  He, too, w
as executed. Alexander II wrote: “Mlodetsky was executed. Everything is in order.”

  Then Alexander II was killed. The great philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, reputedly the inspiration for Alyosha Karamazov, said in a public lecture: “As the representative of a Russian Orthodox nation that does not accept capital punishment, the tsar must pardon his father’s assassins.” He wrote to the new tsar. Alexander III’s reaction was: “Psychopath.”

  Rysakov was only nineteen. He had a conversion at the canal. He saw with his own eyes how his bomb killed innocent people. And how Grinevitsky’s bomb blanketed the snow with bloody human fragments. He saw the painful death of Grinevitsky, his friend Kotik. Now he wanted, as he wrote, “to do everything against terror.”

  He appealed to the tsar. “Pleading for mercy, I refer to God, in whom I had always believed and believe now…. I am not thinking at all of the ephemeral suffering that accompanies capital punishment, I have come to terms with that thought during the month of my incarceration, but I fear only appearing before God’s terrible judgment without having cleansed my soul through long repentance. Therefore I beg not for the gift of my life, but for a postponement of my death.”

  He was executed.

  In 1905, Ivan Kalyaev killed one of the sons of Alexander II, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, his widow and sister of Alexandra, the last tsaritsa, and the wisest person in the Romanov family, came to Nicholas II and begged him to forgive Kalyaev.

  He was executed.